An horizontal figure eight shaped blob of multicoloured light with vector arrows indicating the magnetic field of the planet Jupiter.

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   CosmicRami (cosmicrami@aus.social)'s status on Thursday, 21-Dec-2023 08:42:23 JST CosmicRami

   OTD in 2020, Jupiter & Saturn came into conjunction (closest since 1643). MeerKAT (radio interferometer in South Africa) also turned its gaze towards the planets to observe their radio emissions.

   They serendipitously discovered a pulsar in the background!

   Here in the first inset, you can see Jupiter (which is a bright radio source in our sky), as well as Saturn (annotated 'S' - note that it is not as bright a radio source as Jupiter) and the pulsar (annoyed 'P' which stands for pulsar with anomalous refraction recurring on odd timescales - PARROT).

   Also (last two insets), can we all appreciate how incredible Jupiter looks in radio with MeerKAT 𝐵-field vectors overplotted? Radiation belts FTW!

   Oh, and those other sources - they aren't stars ... they are all supermassive black holes in distant galaxies in the background! (look at those jets!)

   📸 https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12165

   #Planets #SolarSystem #RadioAstronomy #Astrodon